For All The Time We've Lost
by tinseltowns
Summary: Neither of us is really ever meant to smile, or laugh, or have friends. I thought that maybe someone who had the same mentality and the same mind I did would understand, but I was wrong. It only made things more difficult.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of the characters mentioned. This idea is purely mine, however. I think.

**A/N: **This is filed under things I write while I should be sleeping. I got a little bit of inspiration, and here you are. Enjoy.

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><p><strong>FOR ALL THE TIME WE'VE LOST.<strong>

...

_I wish I could feel real. I wish that you didn't make me feel like some sort of inanimate, useless object, and instead make me feel like I actually meant something to you. But I don't mean anything, now do I? I'm just, there, for you to watch suffer. Do you even like to watch me suffer? Do you like to see my pain? Is this on purpose? Or are you just mistaken?_

Eli paces his room, the paper wound tightly between his fingers. His eyes are deceiving him, and he's imaging this, isn't he? She wrote this? _Well __of__ course __she did__,__ dumbass_, he thinks. It's her handwriting, her scripture-scrawled-manic-perfect handwriting, in blueish purple ink. It was written with that same pen that's always caught between her perfect teeth, the one that she tucks behind her ear and keeps there, forgets to take out when she moves from class to class, the one that stays rested in it's place between her ear and her head as she bobs through the hallways and works her way through the masses. Slipped it through the slits of his locker door, telling him to wait until he was home, until he was away from everyone else, to read it.

_I wish you'd see me for who I am, for the person that I want you to see me as. I'm not her, and I can't be her, no matter how much I want to or no matter how hard I try. I can't be her, or Julia, and I can't be the person you dream about at night. I want to be, so badly, and I hope that one day you will see me for who I am; I am myself. I'm not comfortable with that, not yet. And I don't think I deserve the best, but I try to get it anyway. I try, and I try, and I try, but I just keep getting told no over, and over, and over again. By you._

He chokes. Metaphorically, he is choking. Literally, he cannot breathe. Reading this, reading her words, hearing her voice, is real. He can hear her sentences pouring out in her honey-coated strings of words and vowels, her lips made of lace and glitter, her eyes made of irises. Her eyes lined with charcoal, her hands dipped in gold, she is a mystery, and enigma. And she is slowly unraveling and assembling and tightening and weakening, with the rise and fall of his own breathing. And he can't understand her, but at the same time she makes perfect sense, because they are mirror images of one another.

_So, that's why I'm ending this. That's why I'm getting away from here, leaving, if you will. I'm not going to sugar-coat things, and say that I'm not leaving because of you, but merely because my parents want to move somewhere else. But no, I'm leaving without my parents. I'm by myself, and I'm by myself because you closed the door, and cut me off. I'm alone because you let me be alone, and because I let myself let you let me be alone. I let myself do this to myself, and let myself do this to you. In a way, I created the monster you've become, and I mean it fully when I say you are a monster. I am afraid of you. Everyone's afraid of you. _

His hands begin to shake, and the earth begins to fall around his feet. Eli blinks, and his palms sweat, and his knees grow weak at the realization that he is not human. He is a creature that does not know remorse, nor apathy, but knows merely malice. He knows not of love, but of longing and desperation, masked as love. He thinks he loves her, and he thinks he doesn't love her. He wants one, and not the other, and then sometimes he wants both. Sometimes he doesn't want either of them, and wants nothing more than eternal darkness, an abyss, a labyrinth to be contained in, trapped in blissful agony for the rest of existence. He wants to be punished, and he wants to be tormented for what he has become. Or for what he has been born as. Maybe he's born to manipulate, and maybe he's born to initiate the pain and suffering of others. Unwillingly or willingly, he does not know, and he does not want to care.

_Maybe, in the future, I'll come back. Maybe then, you'll have decided whether or not you'll still continue to pursue her, or pursue me. Or maybe, right now, I should just end it completely, so I can't come back. Maybe it'd be better for me to just disappear, instead of feeling like I'm slowly fading. I'm fading, because of you. I deserve better, or at least that's what I'm telling myself, and what everyone else is telling me. But what if I don't deserve better? What if, in fact, I'm supposed to be stuck like this? I'm supposed to be unhappy? Does anyone truly want to be unhappy, to not know a single good thing that has ever happened to them in their lifetime? That type of existence is useless, and that is my existence, and it's my fault. It's all my fault, for falling for you, and thinking that I could ever build something stable when I'm so unstable, and you're so unstable, and the whole world is so fragile. _

Fragility was a word that the therapists and the doctors had always used, back at the hospital. Fragility was something they'd associated and had not associated with Eli; his mental stability was at a low, and his physical appearance wasn't close to presentable. He was a mess, and he still was a mess, and the medication was only making him worse. The first, that made him numb. Numbness was something he'd desired, something he'd longed for, but in a different form. The form he'd longed for was something more permanent, something more dependable. This numbness was shallow, and only lasted as long as the pills did. What happened if he ran out one day, when he really needed them? They ran out on him, like so many physical beings had run out on him in the past. Pills, people, they were all the same. Each one, each color, each shape and size and form and name has a different use and a different purpose. _We__are__no__different__than__our__material__possessions,_he thinks.

_I am a china doll. I am a little doll, a little Barbie doll in a Barbie house with Barbie makeup and Barbie clothes. I am unreal, I am plastic, and I know this. I regret it, because this type of life does not allow sympathy, and does not give an excuse for emotion. I have to be this way, or that way, or forced into a stereotype or category because of the way I look or the way I talk or the way I walk. Because I like something or don't like something or hate something or love something so much I want to kill myself, I am judged. We are all judged, by the things that we like and don't like, love and don't love, hate and don't hate. What I hate is myself, and what I hate is you. But what I don't hate is you, too. I love you, Elijah Goldsworthy. And I will always love you, whether I want to or not, and that's why I hate myself. I hate myself because I give you everything, and you don't give me anything back but a cold shoulder._

Eli does not move. He hasn't finished the papers, the four little papers, written front and back with that familiar ink, with her familiar scent lingering on the white, blue-lined papers. He wonders, and he thinks, and he can't help but think that he is the most horrible person to ever grace this planet. He thinks that he's the most despicable, malicious, disgusting thing in the world. He wants to grab himself by the shoulders, and tear himself in two, and let his mangled, worn-out body fall to the floor of his bedroom and lay there for his parents to find. Maybe this is how she feels, he thinks, and he laughs at himself for thinking he can sympathize with her. That's the last thing she would want, would be for him to feel bad for her. She doesn't want him to feel bad for her. She wants him to love her, and he doesn't know if he can bring himself to do that. He wants to, in a way, but in another way he never wants to see her again, because he's terrified of her, and what she'll do. In a sense, she has just as much blame for his state of mind as she does. But he takes into account the pressure that she puts on herself to be what he wants, and how it seems as if every aspect of her life revolves around pleasing him. He's never had someone care about him that genuinely, and that fully before. And it makes him feel suffocated. He finds it sickeningly ironic.

_I don't know where to go from here. I'm probably gone by now, gone physically. Gone emotionally, maybe. Depends on how easy I am to forget. My bet is you're feeling remorseful, but not too remorseful. You were never one to feel bad for anyone but yourself, were never one to pine for me. You never pined for anyone except Clare, you know. You were always chasing after her with that lovestruck look in your eyes, with your tail between your legs when she'd stare back at you with that glint of fear in her eyes. Your heart practically beat out of your own chest, and I was jealous. I was more than jealous, because I couldn't, and still can't, help but think that that should be me. I am the one who was supposedly worthy of your love. I can relate to you more than she can. Is she mentally unstable? Does she know what it's like to have someone die? Does she know what the voices in your head say? Does she think you're crazy, does she know? Does she know all the things I do about you? Do you?_

"No," he mutters. Eli runs a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face impatiently, worriedly. He's become more and more anxious, and his hands are shaking more intensely, and his vision is blurring. Light is pouring in through his windows, supplied by the stars. It's seemingly impossible, how bright it can be this late at night; he almost can't believe it himself. He wonders if it'd be the right thing to do, to run after her. To run to her house, to fling open the door, see if she's sitting on her bed calmly, scribbling down some notes on the script to the play he's written, or drawing the intricate patterns of his jawline, or muttering something on the phone to her friends back at arts camp about his eyes. Everything about her is him, yet everything about him is Clare. His world revolves around her, and her world revolves around him. He wishes that he could feel the same way. He wishes that it was just the flip of a switch, and he'd move on, and he'd be walking down the hallways with her, hand-in-hand, whispering and laughing and creating a demented little kingdom, full of cobwebs and raindrops and heated kisses. He wants it, and he can't have it. Neither can be happy, but merely miserable.

_You are the only person in the world I ever wanted to care about me. You are the only person who's opinion really mattered, and if you weren't in the room, then I was relaxed, and I could take a break from putting up this model image of myself. But when you're around, my breath stops, and my heart stops, and everything just stops. You're my world, and it sickens me and eats away at me that I'm not that way to you, and I hope and wish and pray that things will change one day, and you will love me, but I don't know if that will ever happen, or that it's even possible. One day, maybe, you'll think of me, and you'll smile, and you'll wish you'd kissed me or held me in your arms one last time before I blew away into the wind, like the smoke of a cigarette, or the mist in a storm. I wish I could leave you on a happier note, but we both know that neither of us are happy people, in any way. Neither of us is really ever meant to smile, or laugh, or have friends. I thought that maybe someone who had the same mentality and the same mind I did would understand, but I was wrong. It only made things more difficult. So here goes nothing, and here goes leaving, and here goes everything that I had thought and still think, into the wind. My love for you, flying away with the wind, floating up through the clouds and joining the stars._

Eli crumples the paper. He lets it fall to the ground, onto the wooden floor of his bedroom, and he pauses, and he listens, and he waits. Taps ring out against the pane of his window, and he swears, he can see the gold. But he could be imagining it.


End file.
